Who Followed Romeo
by xheartmehorrid
Summary: Here's to my love', indeed. Curly Shepard's love has cursed him to a fate more of the same. One love's death must be followed by the death of him. [ somewhat Curly x Tim ]


**( who followed romeo )**

Consider it disclaimed.

* * *

"I don't understand," I said. You said, "You'll never understand."

That morning you had found me in the windowsill, curled up beneath _the_ blanket - yellow, baby, soft as a lamb, with beer-stains and blood-spots that smelled like you, me, everything - still sort of drunk from the night before, and very quieted now. Calm and placid as a kitten but more snivelly, more blubbery than before, and worse, the plume of those heart-heavy sighs that fogged the glass pane and my thumbtack, cardboard hand.

"Come here," you said. You sat down on the edge of that old, frosty window-seat, patted my leg and pulled me up to you even though I wasn't moving my own body, sloth-like and fetal, for the grief had stricken me too hard; now I was sinking, mewling pathetically, sucking up my chest at the last minute because, of course, you were my brother, and by every scar you were the toughest. And my only scars to show those of my knuckles in those grievous bouts, scarring trails of burning tears that kept me flailing in great thrusts before I fell again to clutch my sides and so, I howled, and every scar was in my heart by every measure, and you never did think I was _tough enough _to be a hood, no less your brother.

Your flannel shirt was half-open, some of the buttons popped off over time and others just undone. You smelled like salt, like baked, like cold hard alleyways, like your knuckles whitening on the handle of switchblade. You smelled like you. And warm. "You keep blubberin' like this, Curlyboy," you said, "and I might just have to knock the sense back into 'ya myself." Your arms were the best thing I'd ever laid myself into, maybe ever known. I swallowed back my mucus-spit-tears, nodding weakly, I imagine. Like a little kid with skinned knees, 'cept fifteen wasn't so little, and the only thing bleedin' was my aching heart.

You looked proud for just one second, and your smile glowed because it was so yours, and because for just that second you were proud. You ruffled my hair - unruly greaseless mop - and ground your knuckles in, so that I swatted both hands to bat you halfheartedly away. "Buck up, kid," you said, like Dallas used to say to that scrawny Cade boy, "kid", afore he died, and Dallas, too.

You got up and went away. I felt like I'd miss you sorely, but also that now I had to make my stand again; and you know I had an awful lot to prove. A hood can't lead his outfit right without snivelly little brother smoking cigarettes aside and saying, "Yeah," in his most alley voice. Boy, I hoped enough.

But that was this morning. After that, later, you said, "You'll never understand," and you were so hard, brother, that I thought maybe finally you'd become steel, and scars, and that maybe this once the fighting had caught up with you; or maybe, sorely, just your joints were stiff, but I suspected that your heart was stiffer for it from your eyes - like tar pits boiling down to hard, black moat - and maybe you'd become just pain like you had always thought before you were, that sometime shortly you would be.

I think that, maybe, all hoods become their pain sooner or later, because what broken, stitched up shell like a life-beaten hood's could ever hope to contain that kind of grief for years, the crazy street-cat pain, the blood-choler, the alcohol, the switches? Too many trips to the cooler for you, brother. Too many prison cells, too many heaters, legs broken up you've run from the police so many times.

And yet you looked at me with that stoney and unshed tears, jaded-by-life Tim-Shepard face and said, lowly, "You'll never understand." Your voice was like the gravel driveway. Did you look away from me because there may be redness in your eyes, a dampness? God, brother, I understand. I do.

You've been warm salty baked hard cold for too long. Tough for too long. "Hood," "grease" for too long. My god, brother, your eyes have been a drought for eighteen years. I only wish you weren't afraid. And by the way your shoulders slouched and stiffened, you, the blackness of your eyes, and trembling fists, you scared the hell out of me, too.

You left, that night. I figured you had gone to Buck's. Or was it too much to go back there, drinking? The whiskey lighter fluid in your veins was rushing madly, the bile on your heavy-weighted tongue rising against me. Your gut was twisted, knotted up so tight; how could you breathe? Like a switch in your stomach, like a dagger head pressed so far in your guts that maybe you were wrapped around it, and maybe you were suffocating but good God I know you wouldn't struggle, no, because that switch had been lodged in there so long the fucking thing was rusting over. So were you.

So could you drink another drink, you, are you too empty now to binge and purge? By the blanks of your eyes, there is nothing left but walls of solid steel, and soon enough I fear that your heart may stop beating. Maybe you would rather wrench it out than have to live with the smell of those rooms, fingers on the doorknobs where he touched, the pillow where he laid his head? You've seen his blood-spots on the carpet like the blood-spots on your shirt, my blanket, and I think every day that I can help you, that you can be helped, but tonight you'll see those blood-spots browning and I know, to you, they will not smell like you me everything but _him_ and maybe you will stuff that house of feelings, gaping fist of bitter, carefree memories with more blood of your own?

Another greaser's bloody hand smeared, bloody body in white paper bags because he was a fucking hood and let's drink to 'em, because death's the end of it and that's just it. To Buck he doesn't give a shit. But what will _I _do without you?

I chased you out the door until I doubled over, panting, in the empty lot. The air was blown out of my lungs. I lost you sprinting off into the dark, under the streetlights and into the dark, cold cover of thin alleyways where thugs are always lurking. My hands were on my knees, and I was gasping for air like a fish out of water, eyes augmented because, _fuck, what if I've lost you_? What if you're gone for good?

Gone because, again, like every time, I can't keep up. You were running away from me so fast, brother. Where do you have to go? Where else is there left for you to run? I wanted to start up and scramble after you. My heart was aching and tearing through my fingernails, beating out of my chest, hammering down into my bone-casket body of blood and veins and cigarette smoke and I wanted to chase you, you, but I held myself back. I knew when to go and when to stay put where I was, especially in regards to you and your affairs. But this time I wasn't only being left behind.

That, that was the scariest thing I've ever had to do. Fuck rumbles; skin fights and street-fights, fuck being stabbed or pelted down with bullets from a gun and being slung into a garbage can, rotting somewhere in downtown Tulsa; no, forget that! Letting you go and never knowing if, maybe, that was the last time that I'd ever see you; that fear almost killed my bleeding heart there on the spot. The empty lot where _he_ and Johnny used to smoke, those greasers. Every shadow whispered ghosts and memories.

My eyes began to burn, and so I cried because, forgive me brother, I only couldn't help it. And maybe I won't ever understand.

I fell asleep in my ramshackle bed that night - the soiled mattress on the floor, the heap of spoiled blankets - and banged my fists against my pillow 'till my cheeks were sore and flush, and blubbered softly, sobbing. My resolve is broken, I thought, in the quiet, here, alone, there's no one here to hear me act out so shameful.

I had a dream. I dreamt that you were running through the back alleys; tearing through the streets like a madman, face flushed but sallow pale, and you, dripping with sweat, your eyes as wide as though you'd seen a fright, and your throat tearing with your grieving howls. You paused, panting in deep droughts of breath.

You sucked in too much air, and heart was beating madly. You, finally, had lost yourself, and in a burst of anger and adrenalin and, good lord, _agony_ - your grief, insane with grief and emptiness and wild heartbeat hammering - you threw over a cluster of trash cans so that the waste went scattering, and you flew on into the darkness. Where were you next?

Through the desolate streets of Tulsa you dashed as though the devil may be on your heels; and maybe he was. You flung yourself on that greaser's doorway; who was he? The Curtis brothers. And then, you, with teeth snarling like an animal's, you panted out a breathless, albeit deliberate, dark, "Hey, fellas," and you ambled in pushing the surprised Ponyboy away, and you were prowling halfway across the living room. Sodapop and Darry Curtis were there, too, and looked surprised, and their buddies, Two-Bit Matthews and Steve Randle, and thumbs-hooked-in-pockets, swaggering-slouching, you made your slow, casual greetings. Which of them could see the deep depravity in your eyes; the sunken hollows of your ashy, sweat-shining cheeks?

You said, "I was just wonderin', boys, if any 'a you might've picked up a couple of Winston's things." You looked as though you fumbled for a cigarette, grinned. "You know. After they carted 'im off."

Two-Bit and Steve nearly both winced, simultaneously. Ponyboy fidgeted a minute before he piped up, like that good kid he was. He knew the two of you had been buddies, before. "Gimme a minute, okay, Tim?" He said, and then he skittered off into his bedroom down the hall, his hasty footsteps followed up by the sounds of rustling and rummaging shifting out through his open door, and the swollen quiet of those boys, and you, who acted out so sly content.

In both hands he came out with the crumpled pack, a brown leather jacket with the back burned in black, yellow cotton lining. A carton of cigarettes, half-empty, and that jacket? They had taken Two-Bit's switch off with his body; so was this all that was left? It didn't matter much to you, it seemed, because you looked at that tiny heap and when Pony pushed it into your arms, breathily smiling I figured, there's got to be something else that he's keeping for Dally's memory's sake, but to hell with that, when you had the jacket and the cigarettes his dead lips had nearly touched before, right?

When you were gone from there, you were truly gone.

You went stumbling out into the empty lot, I dreamed, and in my dream, you sat down on the desecrated concrete ground, lighter out and _his _cigarette lit damp and crumbled up inside your mouth, jacket wrapped warm and tugged up both your arms, up through the sleeves, frontwards, and your eyes, staring hollowly into the burnt black leather of its back, just like a curse. Is love worse, I thought, or loss? And the pain wrenching in me, pain like that of that very earlier morning - which was for you, see? And never knew it - and jealousy, envy even for the dead, because I loved you more with every part of mine, brother, than you loved me, and why did it drive you so crazy over the edge to see him dead like every hood is dead sooner or later in this place?

Under a streetlight, where we all fall bullet-holed someday? And for love of Johnny, mad-stricken grief, like yours, subdued and black, which really was why he had died. You shook your head and murmured, "Curlyboy," with that snaggley, sharp-toothed Shepard grin, a flash of switch. Just as if you were saying out loud, _I'm sorry, kid_, and was that what you were saying - what you meant to say?

"Dally," came the quieted, more whispered word, voice cracking soft with unshed tears, the haze of that bittersweet cigarette smoke, in ashy ember plumes, making your breath cloud gentle and foul against the night air.

Again, that flash of switch, of switch's ear, and I awoke thrashing upright and screaming. Oh, my brother, gone? Why, you? Why me? I started up and sprinted outward searching in the night for you, my rumpled hair and screaming, tear-flamed cheeks, and legs that carried me stumbling clumsily but swiftly to the place I dreaded, whispering with haunts of dead boys and unspoken words. And did I know? I, maybe I must have. . .

And, god damn, I screamed.

I climbed on top of you with my whole flinging body - there, you! - with fingers fisted in your collar, burnt brown leather, and sobbing wildly, shaking your lolling head that smiled up at me so queasily. The affect was lost on me entirely, for the deep red spotting the corners and streaking the sides of those pink lips, so full and so waxen pale, your sharp incisors and both hands clamped hard around the hilt of something lodged within your abdomen. I wailed so fiercely that I thought I'd crumble and I'd break on top of you there, you, my empty, hard, salty, baked-smelling foolhardy foolish older brother, god, my role model, the toughest, the slickest hood this side of Tulsa, nothing but a no-good greaser, dirty thug! And so smart, and swift, and clever, and hard, and my brother, my brother, the only thing I've ever loved! Gone!

And I, swiping my face until swiping was clawing almost, furiously, and the red marks on my cheeks from digging fingernails were blazing like the deep and stoney fire in my heart, which died - slowly - on top of your limp, deadweight body, and I must have howled, ripped through the night with strangled vocal cords because _Tim! My brother! My brother!_ You were gone, lost, dead, slain, and I was all alone, and you had left me behind, always behind, perpetually. Oh, that I'd never keep up with you, that I had lost you! All that I ever loved, all that I ever cared for; you.

And so I did the thing that true love's remorse and stricken grief would have me do, with shaking hands: determinedly, I plucked the blade-tip from your organs, gushing warm up-spurts of blood, my god, my brother's own blood, and raised it up above my chest, where that damned heart lay beating like a fevered, broken thing, who wants to die; _and for what have I to live?_ Oh, Tim, oh, brother. I choked back burning rivers of fiery, streaking tears - though they defied me, still fell from those sweet, boyish cheeks steadfastly - and his cigarette burn on your lips, his flame-skewed leather the lid to your coffin door, the arms you'd wished to have so wrapped around you as your bed-tomb, and not mine, shaking and choking and swallowing those bouts of tears as I did barely brush my lips to yours, and with great violent trembling hands. . .

Did plunge myself on top of you, and with that switchblade, pushed it in; such quick death, and slow-bleeding wound. . .

_That you ever would have known how much I loved you;  
Maybe then you would have understood._

_

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_

_finite. _


End file.
